Brian Kelly
has won big every place he has been. I knew that before he arrived in South Bend, and I'd heard what a great coach he was, but I really didn't grasp why until I started working on
a story for the ESPN Magazine college football preview issue. The story chronicles all the things a new head coach keeps -- and doesn't keep -- once he takes on a new job and the sales job he must undertake. The Magazine story is about Kelly's first six months on the job.
It's obvious to anyone who has read the blog or seen my chats that I am convinced Kelly is the ideal guy to replace Charlie Weis at Notre Dame. Here are six factors that opened my eyes about exactly why Kelly is such a great fit:
1. What Notre Dame AD Jack Swarbrick said.
"Successful coaches always have a way they do it," Swarbrick said. "They may change as industry trends change, but there's a fundamental way they approach the game. I don't care whether it's John Wooden, Augie Garrido or whatever sport. It couldn't have been more obvious with Brian. Whether it was his view of percentage of body fat by position and the body types he recruits by position, his views on scheduling so that the athletes are released from their football commitment relatively early in their day, he had a definite way. It wasn't 'Sometimes I've done this or I'd like to try this.' It was 'Here's how I run a football program.'"
2. He's already been a successful college coach.
No one will ever doubt how passionate Charlie Weis was about being at Notre Dame, his alma mater. But for all the guy's successes as an NFL assistant, he'd never been a head coach -- and never had been a college coach. It was a completely different animal, and despite the boasts of supposed schematic advantages, the Irish often went onto the field looking unprepared. Kelly knows exactly what he's doing on every phase of his program. So does everyone who works for him. That chemistry and cohesiveness is invaluable, especially at a place as big as Notre Dame. ND legend Ara Parseghian had told Swarbrick that he needed every season he had as a head coach previously before taking over in South Bend.
Within the context of that, Kelly gets that this is
college -- not professional -- football:
"More than anything else, they [the players he has inherited at ND] wanted to feel like they were in college," he said. "I spent money on the game room. I wanted them to play pool. I wanted them to come over here and watch TV. I spent a lot of money on a training table. I think they felt like to come to this building, it was a job, and it can't be a job. Charlie is who he was. That was his background. He did what he was comfortable with. It's college, and it's gotta feel like college."
3. He understands the big-picture stuff.
The view that "
We're ND. We're different" often rubs people the wrong way. But honestly, after spending some time on and around the campus talking to people about Notre Dame, it is legitimately different. I'm sure a lot of people won't like to hear that, but the connection to the campus is unique among all the other college I've visited in terms of service and genuine respect for the place. How that mindset meshes with winning more football games -- and, potentially, national titles -- is something I found fascinating.
I'd heard people talk about this type of thing, but I didn't truly "get it" until I spent some time with Kelly, offensive guard/ND law student Chris Stewart and Carolyn Woo, the dean of the Notre Dame business school.
Kelly had told me a big challenge for his staff was changing what his new players' priorities were. "So the biggest thing that we've changed is their way of thinking on a day-to-day basis," he explained. "It's that they're here for Notre Dame first and foremost. Not that they're No. 3 on Mel Kiper's Big Board at outside linebacker. That's fine, but that can't be the No. 1 reason you're at Notre Dame."
I asked if his approach might be different if he were taking over at, say, Wisconsin or Oklahoma?
"Totally different answer," he says, adding that he'd have been fine with that mentality: "But it's not Wisconsin. It's Notre Dame. So the environment here on a day-to-day basis is different. I'm not saying it's better; it's not worse. Some people say special. That's fine. It's on campus. It's living in the dorms. It's 17 chapels on campus. Therefore, you have to be invested in that. We didn't understand how those principles really affected us when we went to work every day."
I still didn't buy the correlation until asking Kelly another question about it and he went one step further.
"How does Navy beat some of the teams that they beat?" he asked. "They beat them on the character that they have, their discipline, their attention to detail, their love for their country, the passion in the way that they play. Notre Dame has a lot of those trappings. We just have to be able to play on those. It can't be just 'I'm going to recruit a bunch of four- and five-star star guys and roll the ball out.' College football doesn't play that way. We have to be able to get our players playing with a sense of pride and a sense of ownership in Notre Dame. That's what we're working on right now."
When Woo met with Kelly a few months ago, she asked the new Irish coach what he wants his players to achieve beyond winning football games.
"Our students' lives, their sense of who they are, what they can do, and how well prepared they are, is our job," Woo later told me. "It's very important to me that we push ourselves to do the best by our students and to do it 'The Notre Dame Way,' which is winning always the right way. That took [the business school] to No. 1 [in the nation]. We didn't start out at No. 1; Business Week did not do rankings of the undergraduate programs 'til five years ago. We entered the rankings at No. 3. We were very focused on what we needed to do for the students, and that got us where we were."
Kelly's point is that it's for these reasons -- not in spite of them -- that he's convinced the Irish will win national titles again. One of the by-products of this is Kelly's "Irish Around the Bend" program of community service, which he thought of after being hired.
"We're taking a more a holistic approach," Stewart said. "Stuff we've never done before. We spend two hours every day. We're giving back. I'm working with first- to third-graders. We have guys working with older kids. We have guys at the boys and girls clubs working with high school-age kids. We talk about leadership and service to the community, how to give back and be good citizens and not just football players. Stuff comes out as we're talking with guys from different backgrounds and what we all bring to the team. It really helps the team come together even more."
Said Woo: "I think it's up to us to show that we can win this way because of the message to our young people would be that we can't win the right way. Can you imagine what a horrible message that would be to send?"
4. He understands recruitment and the admissions process.
Kelly's message to his recruiters when it comes to evaluating prospects in consideration of Notre Dame's admissions process: "If you're on my staff, don't worry about the ACT or SAT or even the GPA. Is he a young man that has got a good enough background that if he was in a competitive environment that he can get the work done and still come to practice and not have his head spinning? OK, I need to find a motivated kid who will bust his ass in the classroom. That's what this is about," Kelly said, adding "You can't have a 100 percent graduation rate or 94 percent of your African-American student-athletes graduate if you take kids that are not prepared. Our profile shrinks, but because we're an independent, we can go coast-to-coast."
5. He'll shake things up.
The campus tradition of the
Bookstore Basketball Tournament, the one that QB Dayne Crist and two other football players won last year? Sorry, not happening for ND football players any more. "Maybe after we win two national titles, I'll let them do it," Kelly said.
Says Crist: "A lot of guys were hoping they'd bend on that one, but they didn't."
6. He just gets Notre Dame.
"He reflects in his actions an intuitive sense of this place that is remarkable," Swarbrick said of Kelly. "I hate the phrase that 'Someone gets it,' but Brian gets this place and understands it in a way that, frankly, a lot of people who went here may not.
"You're the new coach at Notre Dame, how do you symbolically start spring football? What do you do? What Brian Kelly did was assemble his entire staff in what may be the most historically significant building on our campus, the log cabin, that is now a replica of where Father Soren first stayed when he got here. And [Kelly] had the president of the university say a private mass for the football staff. That speaks volume on so many levels about understanding the place."
I'm not going to predict that Kelly will win national titles at Notre Dame. I know he has said he will. Maybe he will. I think too many factors have to line up just so for BCS titles to happen, but I do believe that the Irish will at least consistenly compete for them in the next few years, and that is a radical change from the past 15 years or so.
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